AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

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Monday, September 27, 2010

At long last, a group of Aboriginal people are to take Australian journalist Andrew Bolt of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘Herald Sun’ newspaper based in Melbourne, Australia, to the Federal Court accusing him of racial vilification. The documents were lodged with the court on 7 September 2010, and the case is due to be heard this coming Wednesday, 29 September 2010.

For years Bolt has been vilifying people who identify themselves as being Aboriginal accusing them of abusing their racial identity in order to receive benefits and awards that are exclusively for Aboriginal people. Bolt seems to think that some people who identify themselves as Aboriginal are ‘too white’ to be Aboriginal. For Bolt, it would seem that the only test of Aboriginality is the colour of ones skin.

The group that are prosecuting the matter are basing their claim about Bolt’s vilification on two articles Bolt had written and that were published in the ‘Herald Sun’ newspaper. The first appeared in Bolt’s Column and blog on 15 April 2009 and was titled ‘White is the New Black’, and the second appeared as an opinion piece on 21 August 2009 titled ‘White fellas in the black’. In both articles Bolt attempts to vilify people with pale skin and who identify as Aboriginal by implying that they are frauds. Bolt uses his own brand of genetic rhetoric of eye, hair, and skin colour to support his claims.

There’s a certain kind of inverse irony with Bolt’s racial views. Readers may remember the 1978 made-for-television film, ‘Holocaust’, about the attempted genocide of European Jewry by the Nazis during World War 2. In it there was a scene which depicted Himmler, the head of the SS, witnessing the execution of captured Jews by shooting. As the naked prisoners were being lined up prior to being shot, Himmler noticed a young man who to Himmler didn’t appear to be Jewish. Himmler called him over to ask him if he was Jewish. The young man readily identified himself as Jewish to which Himmler then responded: “Then I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do for you”. The youth then returned silently to his place at the execution pit where he and the others lined up with him were then shot. For the Jewish youth who was murdered, his Jewish identity was so important to him that he was prepared to lose his life for it despite the opportunity of possibly saving himself from dying that particular day.

For Aboriginal people, racial identification is also important. It may not be about life or death today, but it may well be about the survival or demise of Aboriginal heritage in the future if the likes of racists like Andrew Bolt are successful in denying those that identify as Aboriginal of their heritage.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

It seems President Obama may be considering using convicted Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard, currently doing life in an American prison for giving American secrets away, as a bargaining chip in the so-called ‘peace talks’ between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Abbas.

Obama is desperate to keep the talks going at least until the November mid-term elections in order to show the American people that Democrats are worthy of being kept on in Congress. Obama may be willing to hand over the ultra-Zionist Pollard to the Israelis in order to placate Israel’s right-wing who are likely to get very upset when they hear that Netanyahu is going to extend the West Bank settlement freeze due to expire on Sunday 26 September. Pollard will be the pay-off to the ultra-Zionists in the Israeli government for the freeze to be extended

The deal achieves pluses for both Obama and Netanyahu as well as for the right-wing of Israel. In short, the deal will buy time for Obama who needs to make things look good between now and the mid-terms; it will also buy time for Netanyahu who can’t afford to be seen by Obama and the rest of the world as a ‘spoiler’ in the quest for peace with Palestine while he waits for an opportunity to provoke enough trouble with Hamas and/or Hezbollah to be able to call all talks off and, hopefully, instigate a war that will escalate to include a confrontation with Iran.

It’ll be a win-win for all – except, of course, the Palestinian people.

The survey has found that the rhetoric of the President, his administration, Congress and right-wing political commentators regarding US support for Israel does not at all coincide with the American public’s view about supporting Israel – especially when it comes to the prospect of war with Iran.

Crucially, when asked; if Israel was to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and if Iran were to retaliate against Israel and the two were to go to war against each other, should the United States bring its military forces into the war on the side of Israel, some 56% of respondents said ‘no’ and only 38% said ‘yes’. (See p.21 of the survey.)

The survey also showed that American’s are in no mood to go to war against Iran directly. 71% favour economic sanctions coupled with continued diplomatic efforts to resolve the ‘crisis’ while 77% supported not trading with Iran and a surprising 62% supported the idea of US leaders having direct talks with Iranian leaders. (See p.19 of the survey.)

The results of the survey are likely to put a dent in neoconservative and Zionist aspirations for regime change in Iran as far getting American public opinion to support military action is concerned. However, one needs to ask; is that likely stop the Israelis from striking Iran and would current American public opinion stop President Obama and Congress from committing the US to war against Iran if Iran were to retaliate against Israel?

Certainly, this side of the mid-term elections, Obama is not likely to support war against Iran and, if that’s the case, Israel will unlikely strike Iran any time soon even if it wanted to. As I have argued consistently at this blog, it is impossible for Israel to launch a truly unilateral strike against Iran; Israel would need the full collaborative support of the US in order to strike Iran. However, if Israel actually were able to strike Iran unilaterally, the US government would feel obliged to support Israel in preventing Iranian retaliation which effectively would mean the US launching an all-out war against Iran, regardless of whether or not the American people supported it, with the US government hoping that, once committed to war, the American people would come around to supporting it – as they have so often done in the past.

In its analysis, the survey suggested that the American people are far more concerned about their own domestic economic plight than they are about Iran, but, whether or not that will stop the push for war by the Zionists of Israel and their neoconservative supporters remains to be seen.

For the Zionists of Israel it’s a matter of manipulating regional affairs to suit their agenda of creating a casus belli which can be used to launch an attack against Iran. This may be via war directly against Hezbollah and/or Hamas instigated as the result of some Israeli provocation, or alternatively, Israel finding some excuse to launch an attack directly against Iran. Either way, I doubt that American public opinion overall will have too much bearing on how Israel finds a way to have the war it’s been itching to have for some years; and I doubt that American public opinion will count for much if push comes to shove and Israel bites off more than it can chew in attacking Iran and finds itself in need of America’s support – again. On the hand, though, I doubt that Obama will be in much of a rush to covertly support, even if he were able to do it covertly, an Israeli unilateral strike against Iran.

UPDATE

Despite American public opinion being firmly against war on Iran, the Republican Senator for South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, who sits on the influential Senate Armed Services Committee, has come out in favour of attacking Iran with air and sea strikes (not invasion) in order to effect regime change in Iran.

Friday, September 17, 2010

I’m not sure who got this one going but the chatter around the neocon traps over the last couple of weeks is that John Bolton just might consider taking a run at the 2012 Presidency. Yesterday, both the ‘Atlantic Wire’ and ‘National Review Online’ were pondering the idea.

So far it’s all been a bit tongue in cheek for Bolton who concedes that he’s not a politician and has never run for any public office before. On the other hand, he reckons he’s been around long enough in different jobs at various levels of government to know how to do the top job.

So far, he’s just been touted as the ‘dark horse’ candidate for President. It maybe that a small kite is being flown just to see how high it will go and by being a little tongue in cheek about it now, he can pull out without losing any face if he feels he’s going to get nowhere with the idea. As Bolton puts it:

I have absolutely no illusions as someone who hasn’t run for elective office before. But I have been talking to people about it to find out whether they break out laughing. I’m sometimes met with a dumbfounded look when I mention it, but most of people then say, ‘Well, why not?’

Well, I can certainly tell them ‘Why not’.

Bolton winning the Presidency in 2012 is possibly the worst scenario that the world – not just the United States – could possibly ever imagine. If America and Israel hasn’t attacked Iran before the end of January 2013 then you can put a substantial bet on it being attacked shortly after if and when the nightmare of a John Bolton Presidency has been realised.

Hopefully, this is going nowhere and that even the extreme right-wing of the GOP will be able to see that. But, if they don’t and they start getting serious about lining Bolton up for the Presidency, then get ready to oppose it with everything you’ve got.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the future of the world would depend on preventing John Bolton from ever becoming President of the most militarised nation on the planet.

The new group is a gathering of international neoconservatives from all over the West. Founded by Jose Maria Aznar, the Spanish Prime Minister who supported George Bush’s push for war against Iraq, the group has attracted many international neocons including extreme right-wing British historian and neo-fascist Andrew Roberts; American businessman, Zionist and neoconservative, Robert Agostinelli; former Bush ambassador to the UN and ultra-warmonger John Bolton; former British conservative parliamentarian, Life Peer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize David Trimble; US Catholic Islamophobe extremist George Weigel; and the aging British publisher George Weidenfeld who is now called Lord Weidenfeld, and many other international notables both Jewish and non-Jewish.

Aznar, who took Spain off to war in Iraq against the overwhelming wishes of the Spanish people and then lost government in an election shortly after, was addressing the launch meeting of his group in Washington when he announced his belief that Israel should be defended at all costs and that the survival of the West depended on Israel’s survival. He told his audience:

…it is not only the threat that if Israel goes down, which, make no mistake, many of its enemies would like to see happen, we all go down. It is that letting Israel be demonized will lead to the delegitimation of our own cherished values. If Israel were to disappear by the force of its enemies, I sincerely doubt the West could remain as we know it.

Aznar and his coterie of international neocon cohorts have made it clear that they now see Israel as the bulwark on the font line of Western exceptionalism that is to be defended at all costs against the forces of Islam.

As the neoconservative rose to power in the Bush administration and then consolidated that power in the wake of 9/11, the enemy, so we were told, was the extremists of Islam. The neoconservatives denied that the war on terror was about defending Israel or that war against Iraq was because Israel needed Saddam of their back as he supported Arafat’s Second Intifada. Saddam, we were told, was an ‘imminent threat to the world’ with his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which, so we were told, he was secretly producing and stockpiling to give to terrorists who would use them to attack the West. The ‘War Against Terrorism’, so we were told, was not about Israel but about defending the West. As time wore on and the neocons were exposed for the liars and Zionists that they are, it became clear that it really was about Israel all along. Now, as the Zionists and their neoconservatives supporters clamour for war against Iran, there is no doubt about who all these wars and threats of wars have been in aid of and Aznar’s new organisation, the Friends of Israel Initiative, and the reason for it’s existence, as Aznar himself explains, proves that it has always been for Israel.

Monday, September 13, 2010

What made them think they could get away with it? Killing three thousand of your own people is one thing; blaming someone else for having done it is something else. One thing is for absolutely sure: sooner or later the full truth will emerge and the evidence against the perpetrators will be overwhelming and, when it does, it will be the end of America’s reason for existence in its present form. The lives and standing of all of the American people will be changed forever in the eyes of the global community. America will become a pariah state.

During the first eight months of 2001, an extremist faction within the George W. Bush administration which had assumed office in late January 2001, conspired with elements of Israel’s secret service and intelligence agency, Mossad, to murder Americans and destroy and damage prominent physical symbols of America’s wealth and power in order to begin wars against those they perceived as their enemies both overseas and at home.

The crime they committed was at first seen as being so horrendous in magnitude that no one dare question the government about the explanation of the events of 9/11 through fear of appearing to be unpatriotic in the face of what seemed to be the greatest threat to America’s power to date. By November 2002 a Commission was established to investigate the attack. It published its findings in July 2004 in a 567 page book titled ‘The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States’. All the report ended up doing was confirm what the government had already told the people of America about what had happened on 9/11. It meant nothing.

Within literally hours of the events of 9/11 America began planning to attack Iraq after first attacking Afghanistan; an attack which had already been planned months before 9/11. Within a month America invaded Afghanistan while at the same time continued to plan their attack on Iraq. They began their propaganda campaign against Iraq in an attempt to build public support for invading Iraq.

Meanwhile, within days of it happening, doubts began to emerge about the veracity of the US government’s explanation about the events of 9/11. Still stunned by the enormity of the crime, most of these doubts were at first ignored. But then, as time went by and the shock of it all had begun to wear off, people began to think a little more clearly about what had happened. They wondered how it was that four scheduled airliners were able to erratically fly around America’s skies for over an hour obviously off course, heading in the wrong direction, not following their flight plans and with their identifier transponders turned off without being challenged by air traffic controllers and being investigated by scrambled fighter jets. Later, as more information was released about the so-called hijackers, experienced people in the aviation game began to wonder how pilots who were barely ably to fly a Cessna around the circuit of the local airfield were able to successfully takeover commercial jet airliners, navigate them to their targets, let them down from cruising altitude to just a few hundred feet above ground level and then accurately crash them in to pre-arranged and targeted buildings.

Then structural engineers, curious to understand why buildings designed to withstand a commercial aircraft crashing in to them had collapsed, began to investigate past occurrences of fire in high-rise buildings to see if these examples might provide an answer as to why the World Trade Center buildings had collapsed. They found examples of numerous buildings that had burned many times more ferociously than the fires in the WTC buildings but couldn’t find one that had ever collapsed as a result of fire.

More doubts emerged when it became generally known that a third building, WTC Building 7, a 47-story high-rise office block, had also suddenly and spectacularly collapsed into its own footprint, just as the Twin Towers had – and without any aircraft crashing into it or having sustained any major fire damage that would have caused a collapse in his manner. Numerous video films of the collapse taken from different angles showed that the building collapsed evenly and at free fall speed, an event that was not at all consistent with a building that had fires contained in pockets within the building. People wondered why none of this was mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

What, people wondered, were the odds of three buildings collapsing totally and fully and at almost freefall speed into their own footprints in one day? People began to ask about what the Fireman and Medics were talking about when they say they heard explosions at various levels and in the basements of these building; explosions that had nothing to do with aircraft flying in to them.

Eventually, those that were really responsible for these crimes and were involved in setting them up will begin to talk. More evidence will emerge implicating more and more people. There will come a time when the government will be so overwhelmed with the evidence that says Islamic extremists – if involved at all in the carrying out of these crimes – did so with the full connivance and support of various personnel within the Bush administration and with the planning and support of senior Israeli right-wing Zionist politicians and elements of Israel’s intelligence service Mossad. At this point Western governments and the US government will have no alternative but to acknowledge full complicity and responsibility for everything that happened on 9/11.

It may well be that by the time the whole conspiracy has fully unravelled to that point that the major players, including Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Douglas Feith, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu and all the others, will have passed on. Let’s hope that at least some of them are brought to justice before that because if none are, then the world will never ever be able to have any faith in America ever again and Americans will have lost all the things that they were told their lives revolved around – freedom, justice and democracy.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

A story in the online UK Guardian sent a chill down my back as I read it today. The title of the article was ‘Muslims in America increasingly alienated as hatred grows in Bible belt’, but it wasn’t so much the title that got me; it was the subtitle. It had an ominous and familiar ring about it: “On the anniversary of 9/11, Chris McGreal reports from the Tennessee town where Muslims have lived in harmony with Christians for decades – but where they now feel under threat”.

Muslims and Christians living together in harmony for decades now feel under threat? Where have we heard this before?

The lunacy of hatred, it seems, has caught up with small town America. It’s a hatred that has recently been simmering all across America fuelled by ignorance and the propaganda of the mainstream media.

As the anniversary of 11 September comes around again it has dawned on me that an extraordinary phenomenon has taken place.

When 9/11 happened, we were told that the attack on America was perpetrated by Islamic extremists. Sure, there was a surge of mistrust and even hatred toward Islam from the predictable right-wing of America, but most folk accepted that the attacks of 9/11 were the acts of extremists and, hey, there have been religious extremists from all sorts of religions throughout American history but they don’t reflect the views of ordinary people within those religions most of whom just want to get on with their lives. As a consequence, while there were a few ups and downs, people of Islamic faith generally continued to get on reasonably well with believers of other faiths in the immediate post 9/11 period despite what had happened. But as the years have gone by, rather than what anger there was subsiding and relations with Islam returning to one of tolerance, the opposite has happened. The hatreds, rather than diminishing, have grown and now seem set to engulf everyone.

In the 1990’s the Balkans witnessed an explosion of hatred that seemed to burst as if from nowhere. It resulted in the indiscriminate deaths of tens of thousands, the vast majority of whom were civilians that were callously and cold-bloodedly murdered for no other reason than they were different from those that were murdering them. Most of the dead were Muslims but the slaughter was perpetrated by people of both sides as the hatreds spiralled into a bloodbath where neighbours, literally, who had lived next door to each other for generations, who had shared work, food and drink with each other and had even inter-married, suddenly turned on each other in blind hatred and began mindlessly slaughtering each other.

But there are other eerily similar circumstances in America today as there were in the period prior to the outbreak of wholesale violence in the Balkans in the 1990’s and that is the economic crisis which swept through the whole of the Federated Republics of the then Yugoslavia. The feeling of utter hopelessness and despair that the people of the Balkans experienced as a result of this severe economic crisis was the physical trigger that violently released the years of pent up anger that had been suppressed during the Tito years. Now, as the so-called Global Financial Crisis bites harder and deeper in the US, many Americans are experiencing a similar feeling of hopelessness and despair. This, coupled with American’s anger over the wars that America’s leaders have got them into since the events of 9/11 and 9/11 itself, and American’s are now at the point where many are ready to unleash their fury on those whom they have been told day in and day out by the mainstream media ever since 9/11 are responsible for their woes; Islam and those that are Islam’s practitioners, Muslims.

But the potential for ethnic and religious violence isn’t confined to America. Europe is at an even more advanced state of ethnic and religious potential for violence than the US. Across Europe anti-Islam movements are growing at a horrendous rate. Anti-Islam propaganda and commentary has reached epidemic proportions on the blog pages of the mainstream online media. The English Defence League attracts larger and larger numbers to their anti-Islam demonstrations. In Europe, extreme right-wing anti-Islam parties are gaining numbers at the polls and winning seats on councils and in parliaments. Journalists and commentators in the mainstream press attract massive followings as they call for a halt to Islamic migration, bans on the wearing of Burqas and even bans on building Mosques.

But why now, nine years after 9/11? Why didn’t this happen in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when one would have thought that, if it had to happen, then that would have been the time?

Undoubtedly the mainstream media must bear the responsibility of creating the mood within which this is all happening. Western governments have followed a policy that supports Israel’s stance against the Palestinians and the West’s mainstream media has given them unfettered support. In turn, Iraq and Iran as nations, and despite having fought a bitter war with each other, have condemned Israel for what they have done to the Palestinian people, as have so many people of other Islamic nations. Israel had accused Iraq of supporting the Palestinian’s fight against Israel. The US then found an excuse to eliminate Iraq as an enemy of Israel. Having eliminated Iraq, Iran is now also in the frame to be dealt with as the next Islamic state that is an enemy of Israel, and it is the rhetoric and propaganda of Israel and the West that is now preparing the way for Iran’s elimination as Israel’s enemy that has stirred the pot of hatred of Islam in the West.

I hope that what the world witnessed in the Balkans in the 1990’s wasn’t just a foretaste of what the world will experience itself as the spiral of hatred whirls out of control fed by the West’s own mainstream rhetoric and propaganda.

Friday, September 03, 2010

Much has been written, particularly over this last year or so, about the prospect of war against Iran. The talk of war revolves around what is claimed to be Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Israel and their neoconservative allies in the US and elsewhere around the world have managed to get Western leaders to join with them in accusing Iran of having a clandestine ‘nuclear weapons program’. As a result, pundits and commentators alike have proffered their analysis of why there may be war based entirely on the presumption that Iran does indeed have a ‘nuclear weapons program’.

However, the reality of the situation is not at all as it seems.

Despite the deafening rhetoric about Iran’s so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’, there is actually not a skerrick of hard evidence to suggest that such a program exists. The consistent and unrelenting accusations from the Zionists and their right-wing allies in the West over a period of years has drowned out Iran’s denial and insistence that it is only aiming to produce electricity from its nuclear energy program.

But the remorseless rhetoric has caused the world to overlook the fact that there is no actual evidence of a nuclear weapons program. It’s been said so often and so loudly over such a long time that the world now as good as accepts it as given that Iran does have a nuclear weapons program.

As a result of this unrelenting propaganda against Iran, the talk now is not; ‘has Iran really got a nuclear weapons program’, or even; ‘if it has, how can this be a threat to any one of the nuclear armed nations of the world, including Israel, which could obliterate Iran in an instant’ but, rather, the talk is; ‘how best can an attack be launched’, ‘who should launch the attack’, and ‘how far can the West go in attacking Iran in order to prevent retaliation’.

Even those against an attack aren’t against it because there is absolutely no moral, practical or legal justification for it; they’re against because of the consequences such an attack might bring. They worry not so much about the massive loss of life such a conflict will bring to the region but they worry that it’ll send the cost of oil sky-rocketing and doing untold damage to an already very wobbly global economy.

So, if Iran, as it says, doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program and is only engaged in seeking nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and if there is no evidence to suggest otherwise, why are the Israelis and their neocon allies in the West so insistent that Iran does have a ‘nuclear weapons program’?

The answer is simple: The Israelis and their allies want to use the ‘Iran has a nuclear weapons program’ meme as an excuse to eliminate Iran from being a hindrance to Israel’s political long term aspirations of creating a Greater Israel which includes south Lebanon up to the Litani River, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Regime change in Iran from one that is hostile to Israel and the US and their allies to one that is friendly will dramatically change the entire Middle East and Central Asian geo-political landscape. Such a move will deprive Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip of its ability to resist Israeli expansionist aggression.

However, in order to serve Israel’s ultimate purpose the act of regime change must be seen to be merely an outcome of Israel’s stated aim of eliminating Iran as an ‘existential threat’ to Israel. Regime change instigated by internal conflict in Iran will not serve Israel’s purpose. It would deprive Israel of the need to attack Hezbollah and Hamas and invade Lebanon and the Gaza Strip in order to occupy and later annex them to Israel.

The excuse Israel will use in order to justify an attack, invasion and occupation of the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and the West Bank will be that Israel is pre-empting a retaliatory strike by Hamas and Hezbollah which the Israelis anticipate after Iran has been attacked in order to prevent Iran from building and using nuclear weapons against Israel and the West.

Israel’s ultimate aim is to invade, occupy then annex south Lebanon, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in order to realise their dream of creating a Greater Israel. The payoff for the Americans is an Iran that is as at least pacified and, they hope, with a government that is friendly toward the US and Israel, and for Israel; an impotent Syria and a Greater Israel that will ultimately be cleared of all Palestinians and Arabs.

But, in order for Israel to arrive at their endgame, an attack against Iran is essential. Without that there will be no Greater Israel.

Iran has no nuclear weapons program, but Israel does have a program for creating a Greater Israel.

Is the world going to let them get away with it again? How many millions are going to have to die this time? It’s time the world got back on the streets to protest.

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About Me

is an Aeronautical Engineer, Historian and general carer of what goes on in the world.
Apart from an earlier career in engineering, Lataan also has a First Class Honours BA degree in History and a PhD in International Politics.
All material on this site is available for use without permission but it would be appreciated if the source is acknowledged.